Gorilla in the Room

We await the return of the Gorilla

Random Notes on The Lobby

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

It's not Over

Laura Rozen tells us that the push to war continues.

Though little-known outside the Beltway, the Pentagon officials, Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode, were at the height of their powers among a small, tight-knit coterie of Washington Iran hawks determined, in the wake of 9/11, to push for regime change not just in Kabul and Baghdad, but in Tehran as well. Farsi speakers both, they had become increasingly influential as advisers to top Pentagon officials consumed with planning a response to the terror attacks. Franklin was the Iran desk officer in a Pentagon policy office that would eventually include the Office of Special Plans, an alternative intelligence shop that became closely allied with Ahmed Chalabi and his band of Iraqi exile informants. Joining the pair in Rome was Michael Ledeen, a neoconservative historian and activist who is among the most impassioned advocates for overthrowing the Iranian regime.

...

The real story, as I learned in the course of a two-year investigation that took me from sterile Washington offices to smoky exile pubs in Paris, is more interesting. It’s also not over. As the crisis with Iran deepens and moves to the fore, the Bush administration is putting in place key elements of the vision spun in part by the men at the Rome meeting. In a new campaign to ramp up pressure on the Iranian regime, millions of dollars are pouring into exile groups, anti-regime propaganda, pro-democracy projects, and intelligence gathering. State Department and intelligence personnel are being deployed to the region and new Iran operations offices are being “stood up” in the State Department and Pentagon—the latter even featuring some of the names familiar from the pre-Iraq-war Office of special Plans.

Link to Moran Article

I have added a link to WaPo article on Jim Moran's statement that the "[i]f it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this," which doesn't seem controversiak to me, but had some people agonizing.

Moran went on to say:

Moran said in comments first reported by the Reston Connection and not disputed by Moran. "The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going, and I think they should."

James Webb for Senate

The Daily Kos is pushing anti-war candidate Democrat James Webb for the VA Senate seat here.

Webb has military and government service background, including service in Viet Nam, and looks to be a strong challenger to Republican incumbent George Allen. He will have a lot of credibility as an anti-war candidate.

Monday, June 26, 2006

McGovern on Drumheller and the CIA

Ray McGovern discusses the Drumheller disclosure:

Tyler Drumheller [...] is now spelling out chapter-and-verse the deceitful "intelligence" adduced by "Slam Dunk" George Tenet and his "if-you-say-so" deputy John McLaughlin. Sunday's Washington Post article by Joby Warrick has Drumheller elaborating on the raging dispute within the CIA over the credibility of a defector labeled (appropriately) "Curveball." Curveball is the source of bogus stories about "biological weapons trailers" to which then-Secretary of State Colin Powell gave such prominence in his (in)famous speech on Feb. 5, 2003, at the UN: "We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and rails."

[...]

What is truth? The president wants war, and we're here to help. Besides, Curveball's reporting is no worse than the other cockamamie garbage we've given Powell to say. We'll win this war handily; the Iraqis will welcome us with cut flowers and open arms. We'll be in the Middle East big time, sitting on all that Iraqi oil and building permanent military bases, having deposed a "ruthless dictator" and eliminated a sworn enemy of Israel – now tell me, who is going to come along at that point and fault us for using bogus intelligence?

CIA Warnings on WMD Ignored

It is shocking to me that the CIA is blamed for the intelligence failure when the CIA, or at least elements within the CIA, got most of the intelligence correct - the CIA knew much of the "intelligence" on WMD was bogus.

It really is the "big lie" of the Bush administration, a lie that is not challenged nearly enough by the press. It is kind of like the Karl Rove campaign strategy of attacking your enemy’s strength as his weakness.

In late January 2003, as Secretary of State Colin Powell prepared to argue the Bush administration's case against Iraq at the United Nations, veteran CIA officer Tyler Drumheller sat down with a classified draft of Powell's speech to look for errors. He found a whopper: a claim about mobile biological labs built by Iraq for germ warfare.

Drumheller instantly recognized the source, an Iraqi defector suspected of being mentally unstable and a liar. The CIA officer took his pen, he recounted in an interview, and crossed out the whole paragraph.

A few days later, the lines were back in the speech. Powell stood before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 and said: "We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails."

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Post Publishes Whitehouse Misinformation

Robert Parry discusses some of the creative history being practiced by the Whitehouse and, unfortunately, being being repeated by the Washington Post.

One also might think that a newspaper would have some interest in holding dishonest politicians accountable, especially when the consequences of their deceptions have been as grievous as George W. Bush’s Iraq War lies. But that also is not the way of the Post.

More than three years into the Iraq War, the Post’s top news executives remain steadfast defenders of Washington’s neoconservatives who pushed the dangerous doctrine that military invasion was the way to “democratize” Muslim countries in the Middle East. In 2002-2003, the Post’s senior editors cast Iraq War skeptics out of the polite opinion-page society – and are still at it.

Monday, June 19, 2006

The Only Organization

I meant to comment on this last week. AIPAC has sent out an "Iran is a threat" fund raising letter. AIPAC is determined to have the United States engage in war with Iran.

By Carol Giacomo, Diplomatic Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - As the Bush administration pursues sensitive diplomacy, the influential U.S. pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC has sent out a fundraising letter seeking support for a tough U.S. line against Iran's nuclear program.

In a letter to supporters this week, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee requested contributions to build support for a proposed law tightening U.S. sanctions on Iran. [Which will lead to war.]

...

AIPAC, with about 100,000 members, has for years considered Iran and its nuclear program the most serious threat to U.S. ally Israel and sought to ensure a tough American policy.

"Iran's apocalyptic president (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) has openly and repeatedly called for Israel's destruction. [Not True.] But long before he began making headlines ... AIPAC was working behind-the-scenes to educate [threaten?] leaders throughout the U.S. government about the growing Iranian threat," the fundraising letter states.

"While many organizations now realize the threat that Iran poses, AIPAC is the only organization uniquely positioned to work with (the U.S.) Congress and the administration to take meaningful action against this terrorist regime," it said.

Well, AIPAC itself thinks it is the only organization that is capable of pushing us into war with Iran. I have to agree, despite that Noam Chomsky that "corporate interests" are the driving force of US policy in the Middle East.

Sunday, June 18, 2006

The History Of the Lobby

There is a great report inConterpunch about the Lobby which dicusses the response to Walt-Mearsheimer paper here

Although the leftist critics speak of Israel as a base from which U.S. power is projected throughout the Middle East, they do not clearly explain how this works. Any strategic value Israel had for the U.S. diminished drastically with the collapse of the Soviet Union. They may believe that Israel keeps Saudi Arabia's oil resources safe from Arab nationalists or Muslim fundamentalists or Russia, but this is highly questionable. Israel clearly did us no good in Lebanon, but rather the U.S. did Israel's bidding and fumbled badly, so this cannot be how the U.S. uses Israeli to project its power. In Palestine, Finkelstein himself acknowledges that the U.S. gains nothing from the occupation and Israeli settlements, so this can't be where Israel is doing the U.S.'s bidding. (With this acknowledgement, Finkelstein, perhaps unconsciously, seriously undermines his case against the importance of the lobby, unless he somehow believes the occupation is only of incidental significance, in which case he undermines the thesis of much of his own body of writing.)

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Airlines Says Only Jews can Fly

The response to lack of security equipment is that only Jews can fly on a certain airline.

Jewish-only policy on Israeli flights?A small airline reportedly allows only Jewish passengers on certain flights because of problems with baggage screening.

Acting on the advice of the Shin Bet security service, the Transportation Ministry decided that Arabs would not be allowed to travel on Tamir Flights planes because a financial dispute prevented the use of luggage-scanning machines, increasing the risk of terrorism, Ha’aretz reported.

Transportation Ministry officials told the newspaper they’re working to find a way for all passengers to fly.

Can you imagine the response to something like this in any other western nation?

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Tendencies

Interesting post from Steve Sailer (again).

The last thing, however, that non-Jews are allowed to do in the U.S. is to objectively discuss the kind of psychological and sociological patterns that help explain why the quality of Jewish political and social decision-making has, on average, not always been as strong as their IQs, work ethics, argumentative skills, and self-confidence might suggest. The first President Bush understood this, but the second didn't seem to have learned this lesson before the Iraq Attaq.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Congratulations to Jim Webb

Anti-war Democrat Jim Webb just won the Virgina primary against political hack Harris Miller, despite being outspent 2 to 1. This is big news.

The Democratic base is starting to assert itself and it is none too soon. I have to think Joe Lieberman is shaking in his boots.

It is worth noting that during this campaign Jim Webb had to endure a bogus claim of anti-Semtism. I guess that is par for the course, but it is certainly getting tiresome.

If you are going to contribute money to a campaign, Jim Webb's would not be a bad place to start.

Webb, a decorated Marine rifle company commander in Vietnam, will challenge Republican Sen. George Allen, whom he endorsed just six years ago.

With more than 80 percent of the vote reported, Webb held 54 percent of the vote over longtime Democratic activist Harris Miller. Webb pulled ahead in a seesaw race with a huge boost in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., the state's most populous region where the turnout was heaviest.

Webb, who broke with the Republicans over the invasion of Iraq and what he says are economic policies that bleed the middle class, said support from senior U.S. Senate Democrats was important to his victory.

Hayden on Feith

I missed this testimony (made during the confirmation hearings) by new CIA Director Michael Hayden:

Senator Levin: "While the intelligence community was consistently dubious about links between Iraq and al Qaeda, Mr. Feith produced an alternative analysis, asserting that there was a strong connection. Were you comfortable with Mr. Feith's office's approach to intelligence analysis?"

Monday, June 12, 2006

Amconmag on Walt-Mearsheimer

Ha’aretz’s Bradley Burston has become so disenchanted with hard-line Jewish-American second-guessing of Israeli peace overtures that in a recent column he confessed, “I used to be an American Jew. And then I read Daniel Pipes,” the leader of Campus Watch, an organization devoted to purging American universities of Israel-critical sentiments. Admitting that the leadership of the American Jewish community was far more intransigent than most Israelis, former Barak adviser Daniel Levy said, “the pro-Israel position in the United States needs to start approximating more closely just where the debate is in Israel.”

The Politics of Holocausts

Steve Sailer discusses the politics of different holocausts.

The reason you almost never hear about the Ukrainian Holocaust, unlike, say, the Armenian Holocaust of 1915, is that among "Stalin's Willing Executioners" (to use Berkeley historian Yuri Slezkine's phrase) in the Ukraine, secular Jews were vastly over-represented in proportion to their small numbers

Stalin went out of his way to assign Jewish secret policemen to the collectivization of the Ukraine because, being a close student of all that is twisted and hate-ridden in history, he knew that Jewish Communists would be the least likely to show mercy to the Ukrainian peasants due to the ancient ethnic animus between the farmers and the Jews employed by the ruling Polish nobles as rent and tax collectors, a hostility which culminated in the pogroms of the 1648 anti-Polish uprising in the Ukraine.

This is certainly an interesting topic as the politics of the Jewish holocaust are a constant part of any debate on Israel and Mid-East politics.

Juan Cole Blocked from Position at Yale

This is another example of the the (non-existant) "Lobby" in action. It's an example of the kind of "power play" supporters of Israel will take to "punish" those who don't fall in line.

Prof. Cole won the "debate" on the merits and was selected for the position. It was only behind the scenes smoke filled room arm twisting that blocked his confirmation.

A tenured professor at the University of Michigan, Cole was tapped earlier this year by a Yale University search committee to teach about the modern Middle East. In two separate votes in May, Cole was approved by both the sociology and history departments, the latter the university’s largest.

The only remaining hurdle was the senior appointments committee, also known as the tenure committee, a group consisting of about a half-dozen professors from various disciplines across the university.

Last week, however, in what is shaping up as the latest in a series of heated battles over the political affiliations of Middle Eastern studies professors, the tenure committee voted down Cole’s nomination. Several Yale faculty members described the decision to overrule the votes of the individual departments as “highly unusual.”

...

When Cole’s potential hiring became publicly known, several of his detractors, including the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin and Washington Times columnist Joel Mowbray, took various steps to protest the decision. They wrote op-ed pieces in various publications and Mowbray went as far as to send a letter to a dozen of Yale’s major donors, many of whom are Jewish, urging them to call the university and protest Cole’s hiring.

And here is the example of the Lobby in action:

“The articles published in the Yale Standard, the New York Sun, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, and the Washington Times, as part of what was clearly an orchestrated campaign, contained made-up quotes, inaccuracies, and false charges,” [Cole] said. “The idea that I am any sort of anti-Jewish racist because I think Israel would be better off without the occupied territories is bizarre, but I fear that a falsehood repeated often enough and in high enough places may begin to lose its air of absurdity.”

Democrats for more War

The Democrats seem more determined to get us into war than Republicans.

Reid is a co-sponsor – along with Sens. George Allen (R-Va.), John McCain (R-Ariz.), Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), and Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). – of the new Iran sanctions legislation, which is opposed by the Bush administration as too radical and warmongering. Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.), not any Democrat, is leading the opposition to the draconian bill drafted by wingnuts Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.). The imposition of strict economic sanctions on Iran would be, in itself, an act just short of war – and would send out an unmistakable signal to the Iranians and the rest of the world: the shooting is about to start.

Friday, June 09, 2006

My Jewish Problem

No, not my Jewish Problem. Philip Weiss'.

My Jewish Problem C'ted: My Tribe Is No Longer a Progressive Political Force

My point of entry here is my own struggle with my Jewish roots. Yes I'm an assimilator, but I know that I'm very Jewish in my thinking and approach, and part of my distaste for the neoconservatives has to do with the way that the Jewish presence in American life has changed in my generation.

...

I would argue that while mainstream Jews are very liberal on abortion and school prayer and Hollywood sex and violence—social issues—they have allowed neocons to represent them—that is to say, Jewish public opinion is a conservative force in foreign policy. Ask erstwhile liberals Waxman (who represents Hollywood) and Lieberman, and watch from whom Ned Lamont's insurgent antiwar candidacy against Lieberman in Connecticut draws its strength. The antiwar movement is so far a populist movement. Not very Jewish. Though, yes, Hilda Silverman and Dan Ellsberg are there.

...

[B]eing a progressive in American life, and opposing the war, both these things necessitate a separation from Israel—a slight separation, inasmuch as he's merely calling for a more evenhanded U.S. policy in the Middle East. The bulk of American Jewry cannot take that step. And so they have been swept to the right.

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Israel Jails, Returns Refugees

Israel is not living up to the high standard some Jewish groups have set for moral behavior.

MAASIYAHU PRISON, Israel (AP) - Standing behind bars and begging to tell of families murdered and homes destroyed, the Sudanese in Maasiyahu Prison are confronting their Israeli jailers with a quandary that taps deep into the trauma of the Holocaust.

The Sudanese, some 220 men and women, say they fled massacres and religious persecution in the war-torn Darfur region and in southern Sudan. But they are not eligible for asylum here because Israel considers their country, an Arab League member, to be an ``enemy state.''

Some agree with me:

[T]heir imprisonment has angered some Israelis, including the director of Yad Vashem, the national Holocaust memorial. They say the Jews, having suffered genocide, have a moral duty to help the Sudanese.

There is more coverage in Ha'aretz:

"The problem is that there’s no cooperation with the Egyptians,” Bar-On said. “There are even cases where we try to push [the refugees] back and [the Egyptians] push them into Israel. It’s truly a game of arm-wrestling over the border, over the refugee.”

Bar-On added that in “hot return,” “you catch and return” without the need for deportation orders and arrest in Israel. Bar-On said the wave of refugees trying to get into Israel in the past several months must be stopped to prevent the country from being flooded with Sudanese.

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Not Wiped Off the Map (2)

More confirmation that the "wiped off the map" translation is completely bogus. Just more propaganda from the propaganda machine.

Unfortunately, the "wiped off the map" quote is a conerstone of this attempt to make a legal case against Iran published in the Washington Post.

The writers (David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey) made a simalar case for war against Iraq based on WMD, which we now know was also false.

It would be nice if the Washington Post took a more skeptical attitude this second time, considering the poor track record of these folks. But, that seems to be too much to ask.

Ask anyone in Washington, London or Tel Aviv if they can cite any phrase uttered by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the chances are high they will say he wants Israel "wiped off the map".

Again it is four short words, though the distortion is worse than in the Khrushchev case. ["We will bury you."] [Ahmadinejad's] remarks are not out of context. They are wrong, pure and simple. Ahmadinejad never said them. Farsi speakers have pointed out that he was mistranslated. The Iranian president was quoting an ancient statement by Iran's first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, that "this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time" just as the Shah's regime in Iran had vanished.

He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The "page of time" phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon. There was no implication that either Khomeini, when he first made the statement, or Ahmadinejad, in repeating it, felt it was imminent, or that Iran would be involved in bringing it about.

But the propaganda damage was done, and western hawks bracket the Iranian president with Hitler as though he wants to exterminate Jews. At the recent annual convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful lobby group, huge screens switched between pictures of Ahmadinejad making the false "wiping off the map" statement and a ranting Hitler.

Vanity Fair on the Niger Yellow Cake Story

Vanit Fair does the Niger yellow cake story:

Though it may be unprepossessing, the Niger Embassy is the site of one of the great mysteries of our times. On January 2, 2001, an embassy official returned there after New Year's Day and discovered that the offices had been robbed. Little of value was missing—a wristwatch, perfume, worthless documents, embassy stationery, and some official stamps bearing the seal of the Republic of Niger. Nevertheless, the consequences of the robbery were so great that the Watergate break-in pales by comparison.

Debate Stifled on Walt-Mearsheimer Paper

Looks like the thuggish tactics of Dershowitz et al. had the intended effect of silencing real debate at the highest levels on The Lobby.

When professors Walt and Mearsheimer (of Harvard and the University of Chicago, respectively) went public with their paper in the London Review of Books on March 23, it seemed the whole world started screaming. From columnists Richard Cohen and Max Boot to historian Tony Judt and Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, public figures battled in the pages of the major papers. Accusations of anti-Semitism and divided loyalties flew. The magazine I work for published three articles on the paper in a single week.

...

But something else happened at Harvard, something strange. Instead of a roiling debate, most professors not only agreed to disagree but agreed to pretend publicly that there was no disagreement at all. At Harvard and other schools, the Mearsheimer-Walt paper proved simply too hot to handle — and it revealed an academia deeply split yet lamentably afraid to engage itself on one of the hottest political issues of our time. Call it the academic Cold War: distrustful factions rendered timid by the prospect of mutually assured career destruction.

Monday, June 05, 2006

Warning to US Citizens Visting Israel

This site claims that a travel warning by the US Department of State on Thursday, June 1, 2006, states:

“U.S. citizens arrested by the Israeli Security Police for security offenses, and U.S. citizens arrested in the West Bank or Gaza for criminal or security offenses may be prevented from communicating with lawyers, family members, or consular officers for lengthy periods. The U.S. Consulate General and the Embassy are often not notified of such arrests, or are not notified in a timely manner. Consular access to the arrested individual is frequently delayed. U.S. citizens have been subject to mistreatment during interrogation and pressured to sign statements in Hebrew that have not been translated. Under local law they may be detained for up to six months at a time without charges. Youths over the age of 14 have been detained and tried as adults. When access to a detained American citizen is denied or delayed, the U.S. Government formally protests the lack of consular access to the Israeli Government. The U.S. Government also will protest any mistreatment to the relevant authorities.”

Zionist Heads Corporation for Public Brodcasting

The takeover continues:

CHERYL F. Halpern, a major Republican fundraiser, has been elected the new chairwoman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). The private, nonprofit corporation, created by Congress in 1967, describes itself as “the largest single source of funding for public television and radio programming.”

Halpern has served on the CPB board since 2002, and has criticized National Public Radio’s Middle East coverage, calling it biased against Israel. She has overseen such U.S. government-funded media projects as Voice of America, Radio Marti in Cuba and Radio Free Iraq. Formerly chairwoman for the Republican Jewish Coalition, Halpern currently sits on the board of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a spinoff of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Israel’s Washington, DC lobby. In 2001 she used her own personal funds to commission a review of anti-Semitism in Syrian textbooks.

...

Perhaps not surprisingly, Halpern’s family has business interests in Israel. She is married to Fredrick Michael Halpern, a real estate developer born in Bayreuth, Bavaria, who is a member of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith as well as of AIPAC. The couple has three children.

Why They Hate Us

Since 9/11 I Buchanans' articles have been absolutely precient, unlike the neocons who seem to be consistently in error.

Why do they hate us?” So stunned Americans asked, after 9/11, when we learned that across the Arab world, many were saying, “The Americans had it coming.”

For a textbook example of why we are hated, consider Gaza and the West Bank. There, a brutal Israeli/U.S.-led cutoff in aid has been imposed on the Palestinians for voting the wrong way in a free election.

...

The early returns are in. “Surgeons at Gaza’s biggest hospital,” says the Financial Times, “have suspended non-essential surgery for lack of sutures, laboratory kits and anesthetics.” Environmental protection agency workers have no money for petrol to monitor sewage and industrial waste entering the water supply. Some 150,000 civil servants, 60,000 of them armed security personnel, have gone unpaid for months.

...

“The aid cut-off appears to be increasing anti-U.S. sentiment here,” writes the Post’s Scott Wilson, quoting 33-year-old pharmacist Mustafa Hasoona: “The problem is the West, not us. If they don’t respect democracy, they shouldn’t call for it. We are with this government we elected. I voted for it.”

...

The White House says we don’t negotiate with terrorists. But when we had to, we did. FDR and Truman summited with Stalin at Yalta and Potsdam. Nixon met with Mao in Beijing. Kissinger negotiated with the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese at Paris. Bush I allied with Assad in the Gulf War. Clinton had Arafat to the White House too many times to count.

Saturday, June 03, 2006

Propaganda Man iInvited to White House

Bush is obviously not upset at the false report of Jews being forced to wear a yellow stripe in Iran. He has invited the reporter to the White house becuase the man is an "expert".

An expert at false propaganda, perhaps.

Iran Bamboozler Invited to White House as "Expert"

Two weeks ago, Amir Taheri published an op-ed in Canada's National Post about an Iranian law that forced Jews to wear a yellow stripe. The story, reminiscent of Nazi Germany, quickly provoked outrage, but was just as quickly revealed to be a total fabrication. It also ran in the New York Post.

Apparently this is just the sort of reliable advice that President Bush needs. Yesterday, Taheri had a face-to-face with the President as one of a small group of "experts" on Iraq that visited the White House.

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Fool me Twice

Will the same playbook work again for Iran?

If we allow the Bush administration to drag this country into a war with Iran, we should all burn our voter-registration cards and go ahead and admit that we are no longer worthy of being citizens of a self-governing republic.

For heaven's sake, the administration is employing the same tactics it used to justify the war against Iraq – refusal to negotiate, lies, disinformation, and demonization of the Iranian leader. Are we going to fall for the exact same con job all over again? If so, we are far too dumb to be trusted near a voting booth.